Jimi Hendrix was born on 27th November 1942 in Seattle which, at the time, had just under 400,000 inhabitants, and was booming. At birth, his young mother chose to call her child Johnny Allen, but was terrified of telling his father, who was pathologically jealous of his wife, and in the army at the time, and could have taken the choice of that unusual name as a tribute to a possible lover or, perhaps, the child's true father.
There has been a lot of confusion surrounding Jimi’s name, and the spelling of it, which he began to use at the age of 22: in any case, his family and friends called him by the nickname Buster, which was given to him by his aunt Delores when he was born. She named him after the comic strip Buster Brown.
Jimi's parents - Lucille Jeter and Al Hendrix - met as teenagers in a club on bustling Jackson Street in Seattle, in what was called the Central District, a multi-ethnic melting pot, as well as a place of black pride and culture, music, in a wild fury of exuberant inhibition. The couple’s roots were a real mixture of diverse ethnicities and social classes: freed slaves, white masters, Native Americans, and immigrants. It is also interesting to note that both on his mother’s and his father’s side, two of Jimi’s great-grandfathers were white slave masters married to freed black slaves, his great-grandmothers. The dysfunctional dynamics of these relationships, which were somewhat emotionally erratic and socially misplaced, also seem to have had a profound effect on the subsequent family events, which were completely lacking in any stability, and were as violent as they were intense.
Lucille, who was unemployed and living as a guest at the home of a family friend, Dorothy Harding, had to deal with some very serious struggles within her family as well as having no money, when her first son was born. With her husband in military service, a very fragile mother, and the untimely death of her father, she struggled to offer her child the stability he needed, and even ended up leaving him with an acquaintance in California for a time.
